Concentration camps in Nazi Germany were originally set up in 1933 to terrorise Hitler’s political enemies; as war drew near, their function expanded to gratify his obsession (and that of Reichsführer Himmler, as head of the SS which administered them) with ‘purifying the race’ by getting rid of gypsies, Jews, ‘asocials’ — prostitutes, criminals, vagabonds — as well as the mentally ill and handicapped. An all-female camp at Ravensbrück, set up in 1938, soon afforded the prison doctors a steady supply of women — the ‘rabbits’, as these prisoners became known — for medical experiments .
After war broke out in September 1939, Resistance fighters from France and other occupied countries and captured enemy agents joined the prisoner populations. Ravensbrück women, as much-needed slave labour, were worked to death in satellite camps, employed by prominent industrial firms. Siemens, the electrical engineers, had a factory adjoining Ravensbrück.
Ravensbrück, a small lakeside village 50 miles north of Berlin, was far from any major centre where it might attract unwelcome public criticism. Himmler was a frequent visitor, not least because his mistress lived nearby. He took a particular interest in the medical experiments and in camp discipline, supporting a programme of savage beating to break the spirit of the Jehovah’s Witness prisoners — sober, grey-haired ladies who believed Hitler to be the Antichrist.
Such camps as Ravensbrück plumbed the greatest depths of horror known to mankind; they make life in the Great War trenches, so scrutinised in this past year of commemoration, seem almost humane by contrast. Out of a total of about 120,000 prisoners who passed through during the camp’s existence, around 50,000 are reckoned to have died.
Ravensbrück inmates knew starvation and exposure to freezing weather; disease; perpetual fear of betrayal, gassing and humiliation; loss of identity; moral corruption of both prisoners and guards; and above all, intense cruelty — as in the case of Katharina Waitz, a trapeze artist whose gallant escape over the camp wire ended in her recapture and mauling to death by guard dogs.
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